مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تأثیرات سیاست Tipping بر رضایت مشتری – الزویر 2020

1- Introduction

2- Method

3- Results

4- Conclusions

References

Abstract

Analysis of online reviews indicates that Royal Caribbean’s abandonment of tipping on March 1, 2013 had no reliable effect on its customers’ ratings of either the overall cruise experience or the cruise service/staff. This finding stands in opposition to previous studies which reported that customer satisfaction and service ratings fell after organizations abandoned voluntary tipping policies in contexts where tipping is normative. Since tipping is no longer common in the cruise industry, the failure to replicate suggests that earlier effects were probably caused by people’s subjective preference for the tipping policies they were used to in those contexts rather than by tipping’s actual effects on service delivery.

Introduction

Tourists from around the world often face expectations that they will leave voluntary payments of money (called “tips,” “propinas,” and “pourboire” among other things) to the workers who serve them. Among those receiving such tips are airport porters, baristas, bartenders, bellmen, concierges, doormen, cab drivers, hotel maids, parking valets, street musicians, tour guides, and waiters. Although tipping is normative behavior in many contexts, firms do not have to passively accept the tipping norms of the locales in which they operate. Firms can adopt no-tipping policies in countries where tipping is otherwise common and expected, as many all-inclusive resorts, hotels, and restaurants have done. Firms can also encourage tipping in contexts where it is rare, such as Frontier Airlines does with inclusion of a tipping option on its onboard digital billing tablets. In an effort to inform firms’ decisions about whether or not to adopt tipping vs no-tipping policies, researchers have studied the consequences of such policies, finding that customer satisfaction and service ratings are higher under tipping than under no-tipping systems (Kwortnik et al., 2009; Lynn, 2018; Lynn and Brewster, 2018; Lynn and Kwortnik, 2015). However, these results were observed in contexts where tipping was common – i.e., among restaurants in the United States and cruise lines near the turn of the century. It is not clear if tipping policies would have similar effects on customer satisfaction and service ratings when tipping is rare and counter-normative. If the positive effects of pro-tipping policies are due to tipping’s role as a performance contingent incentive/reward that attracts and retains better workers and motivates them to do a good job, then those effects should generalize to contexts where tipping is rare, because tipping can serve as an incentive/reward for good service regardless of how common pro-tipping policies are. However, if the positive effects of protipping policies are due to consumers’ subjective preference for tipping over its alternatives, then those effects may not generalize to contexts where tipping is rare. People tend to like what is common or familiar (Rindfleisch and Inman, 1998; Rivis and Sheeran, 2003), so preference for tipping over no-tipping may be diminished or even reversed in contexts where no-tipping is more common than tipping. This study tests for the first time the effects of tipping vs no-tipping policies on customer satisfaction and service ratings in a context where tipping is rare – the leisure cruise industry from 2012 to 2014. Tipping used to be common in cruising, but that started to change in 2000 when some cruise lines began adding automatic service charges to passengers’ bills instead. By 2013, Royal Caribbean International was the last major cruise line to have a voluntary tipping policy, so its abandonment of that policy on March 1, 2013 occurred in a context where cruise tipping was relatively rare (Sloan, 2013). We take advantage of this situation to perform a difference-in-difference analysis testing the effects on its online ratings of Royal Caribbean’s replacement of tipping with automatic service charges.